I nodded, knowing what she meant. She wasn’t an old lady, a biker babe, or someone’s bitch. No. She was too good for all that.
I walked her back to the bike and drove her home, knowing my place in the world would never change.
5
Nitro
Iparked the Harley under the sodium glow of the side entrance, where the wind was thinnest and the cinderblock wall took the worst of it. The club had gone through a recent remodel, reinforcing all walls and windows. Inside the first hallway, the only light came from a single bulb. It barely illuminated the Bloody Scythes’ red scythe logo on the far wall—a Rorschach smear, forever mid-bleed.
I made my way to church, where I found Damron behind the big oak desk at the end of the room. It wasn’t really a desk; it was a family-sized dining table, abandoned in a church basement and salvaged by Seneca after a particularly memorable Christmas Eve brawl. It was covered, as always, with the detritus of our trade: sectional maps of town and county, printouts of phone records, a scattering of handguns, and one battered ledger book bound in black leather and other people’s regrets. Damron’s left hand tapped a line of tension along theedge of a street map, his right never far from the glass of something expensive and brown.
Seneca “The Sadist” Wallace leaned against the wall behind him, arms folded tight, the scar on his jaw catching the pulse of the bulb. He wore the look of a man studying a hostage video for fun, but in his head, he was probably diagramming the room and ranking everyone by threat. I respected that. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be alive. Augustine, the club’s most boring and reliable sergeant-at-arms, stood with his back to the door and his eyes on nothing, which meant he was paying attention to everything.
I stepped inside, shut the door, and let the silence fill in behind me.
“Well,” I said. “Guess you saw the news.”
Damron’s mouth twitched in a way that was almost a smile. “You’re the news, Seager.”
“Hell of a promotion.”
I crossed to the desk, feeling the stiffness in my ribs where the recoil had driven the Glock back against my vest. I set the bike keys on the map, next to a coffee cup bristling with dry-erase markers and box cutter blades.
Damron poured another inch of whiskey and gestured at the only empty chair, opposite the desk. I took it. The bulb swung back, casting Seneca’s shadow across my face. We all waited.
I gave it to them straight—no pacing, no color commentary. I told them about the liquor store, the woman, and the black van. The two men, one muscle, one operator, neither looking local or like anybody I’d clocked in the last five years. I laid out the abduction, the pursuit, the shootout. The way the van’s driver held his weapon, the way the other guy didn’t blink even after I’d put two in his chest. I said how the woman—Seraphina Dalton, confirmed by the lab card—had taken the blows without screaming, how she’d recomposed in thirty seconds or less.
When I finished, Damron pressed the tips of his fingers together and stared at me over the tent of his hands. He looked tired in the way only people who have known hope can look tired. “You think she was the target, or you?”
I shook my head. “Not me. They didn’t make me until I was on the Harley. And they weren’t cartel, not even freelance. They moved different. Military precision, but not our military. Russian, maybe, or one of the privatized outfits. The way they staged the grab was textbook—no witnesses, fast extraction, fallback plan.”
Seneca finally spoke, his voice dry as sun-bleached bones. “You leave prints?”
“Only on the trigger. Wiped the rest. Clerk’s a shitbird, but he won’t rat unless he’s forced.”
Augustine made a sound, a noncommittal grunt, as if to say he agreed but wouldn’t bet his life on it.
Damron’s eyes flicked to the leather ledger, then back to me. “The feds are already breathing down our necks, Nitro. Carly’s office has been calling me every day this week. I got the State boys parked three blocks from here every fucking night. You really think this is going to keep us off their radar?”
He didn’t raise his voice. He never had to. I let the silence after the question run long, then. “She’s not a victim. She’s a variable. You ever heard of Seraphina Dalton before today?”
Seneca raised a brow, and Damron looked at me like he was weighing my body for the best place to hide a knife.
“She’s a scientist at the National Laboratory,” I said. “Rumor is, she’s working on the new AI system for the nuclear command net. If somebody wants her bad enough to run a daylight snatch with foreign muscle, it’s not about ransom.”
Damron poured another inch. He didn’t offer it. “That kind of attention could get us all buried. Fast.”
“It could also buy us leverage,” I said, and I felt the old tickle in my scalp, the one that meant I was right on the edge of a bad idea. “If we play it smart, we find out who wants her and why, and we’re suddenly a lot more valuable than some backwater MC in the desert.”
Augustine nodded, once. Seneca grinned, but it was just a flash of teeth, gone before it registered.
Damron sipped the whiskey. “She knows you’re Bloody Scythes?”
“Pretty sure she clocked the jacket. But she also knows I saved her life.”
“Debts are cheap. Feds are not.” He set the glass down, careful, like it might go off if handled wrong.
“I’ll handle it,” I said.
